For the first week in a while, the non-crypto world was louder than the crypto world.

Everyone is talking about:

How U.S. President Biden is paying off everyone’s student loans (through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program)
How Fed Chair Jerome Powell was skiing with all his friends in the Tetons (at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium)
How Professional Smart Guy Zoltan Pozsar is scaring the living daylights out of us again by writing: “The unfolding economic war between great powers is stochastic and not linear” (in a research note titled “War and Interest Rates”)

Meanwhile, no one is talking about if bitcoin (BTC) is or isn’t an inflation hedge. Thankfully (unthankfully?) each of the things everyone is talking about is (at least loosely) tied to inflation in some way. So I’ll do it. I’ll write about if bitcoin is or isn’t an inflation hedge.

Because everything is about inflation and everything is about bitcoin (even things that aren’t about bitcoin). Stochastic means “random,” by the way.

First off, the U.S. government isn’t paying off everyone’s student loans. What the Biden administration announced was that people who both hold federal government student loans and earn less than $125,000 a year will have either $10,000 or $20,000 of their student loan balance forgiven. There are nitty-gritty details (which you can get by listening to this NASFAA podcast), but the main question we want to answer is if this is inflationary or not.